Frontify presents: Ragged Edge and Tilt discuss trust and tension The Dialogue Advertising Digital

The Brand Identity: Welcome back to The Dialogue, presented in collaboration with leading brand-building platform, Frontify. We are exploring the collaborative relationships behind exceptional brand work through paired conversations with creative partners, revealing how studios and clients work together to produce transformative results. For this fifth chapter, we spoke to both Ragged Edge and Tilt to discuss a rebrand that went far beyond a visual refresh – renaming an established fintech company, reshaping its positioning and building an identity around a deeply held belief in working people.

It’s a story of creative conviction, honest friction and genuine trust. In their very first meeting, someone from the Tilt team asked Ragged Edge a disarmingly direct question: “What makes a great client?” For Jessica Bong-Woon, Associate Creative Director at Ragged Edge, that moment told them everything. “There was an immediate sense that both teams wanted to show up for each other at their best,” she recalls. The connection had little to do with sector expertise or portfolio fit. “At Ragged Edge, we don’t look for a specific industry or type of client – we look for certain qualities in people. People with genuine passion.

People who see the world for what it could be, not what convention says it should be.” For Stephanie Lin, CMO of Tilt, the interest had been building long before that first conversation. She had followed Ragged Edge’s work for some time, drawn to their range and what she describes as an ability to “build origin stories that feel grounded yet ambitious.” But it was their freedom from a recognisable house style that sealed it. “Many agencies develop a certain signature that leaves brands looking and sounding comfortably safe and familiar,” Lin explains.

“I wanted a thought partner who could help us rediscover our own narrative, build something genuinely original, and move us decisively away from category conventions.” Bong-Woon saw something equally specific in the Tilt team. “They clearly cared deeply about the problem they were solving. So much so that we found ourselves believing in it too,” she shares. “That belief creates a kind of crazy flow-state in our team that’s impossible to manufacture.

Add to that their hunger for something genuinely unfamiliar, and it was obvious we could do something remarkable together.” Tilt – then operating as Empower – had entered the market in 2016 with a clear purpose: offering working Americans access to cash without credit checks, interest or late fees. In the United States, over 100 million people lack reliable access to fair credit, shut out by a system that judges them on history rather than potential. Tilt’s underwriting model assesses applicants on more than 250 non-traditional signals of financial health, looking at what people are capable of rather than where they’ve stumbled.

The company had earned genuine loyalty through its products, but the brand hadn’t kept pace with the business. As Lin puts it, “We had built a product that people loved and relied on, but we hadn’t invested as deliberately in the brand itself. That created real brand debt over time.” Rebranding, she adds, “was less about abandoning equity and more about activating it. We wanted a platform that reflects the trust we’d already earned and offers people the language, context and emotion to think about us in a way that goes beyond utility to something far more enduring.” The name itself became a declaration.

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The article discusses a significant collaboration in the rebranding space that highlights emotional connection and trust, which are crucial for brand strategy professionals, although the concepts of trust and tension in branding are not entirely new.